<p><a href="https://career.berkeley.edu/medstats/national.stm%5B/url%5D">https://career.berkeley.edu/medstats/national.stm</a> 55% Into medical school a year is not that great for such a "great" university. Would Pre-meds be better off going to schools like ucla, usc, michigan, wesleyan, vassar, middlebury?</p>
<p>I’m not premed myself, but I hear from others that Berk is not the best place for premed… It tends to ruin your gpa. :p</p>
<p>Med school is all about GPA. They would choose someone with a 4.0 at a easy university over someone with a 3.0 at Cal, even though the applicant from Cal is probably way more qualified and has a better knowledge in preparation coursework.</p>
<p>If your only goal is to get into med school then Cal is not the place for you.</p>
<p>Well, Berkeley has consistently gotten 5-10% more applicants into medical school than average. We would really need to see numbers from other schools (or standard deviation) to compare how well Berkeley does. It’s not that Berkeley doesn’t prepare it’s students well but that medicine is a competitive field.</p>
<p>It’s not all about premed…</p>
<p>^ For some people it is… :p</p>
<p>You’d think people who wanted to do premed would choose an easy university as opposed to Cal. I guess it is because there are more research and extra curricular activities which can look good on a med school application.</p>
<p>numbers from MIT:</p>
<p>[Preprofessional</a> Stats - MIT Careers Office](<a href=“http://web.mit.edu/career/www/infostats/preprof.html]Preprofessional”>http://web.mit.edu/career/www/infostats/preprof.html)</p>
<p>84% acceptance rate for med school.</p>
<p>A school where engineering and science are huge is bound to have lots of self selection among premeds. Different from a huge pool of frosh flocking to do premed because it seems as good as anything else, and ‘doctor’ sounds good.</p>
<p>[Grade</a> inflation](<a href=“http://www.gradeinflation.com%5DGrade”>http://www.gradeinflation.com) can have a lot to do with how good a school is for pre-meds, since medical schools are heavily GPA (and MCAT) focused. Based on the school by school listings at the bottom, it appears that Berkeley’s average GPA is similar to that of many other large public universities, though in combination with a more competitive student body than many of them, that can make it harder to get a medical school acceptable GPA. Some prestigious private universities, like Brown and Stanford, have a very high average GPA.</p>
<p>I graduated from Cal and was accepted at several good (but not top ten) med schools. I have also served as a student member of my medical school admissions committee. Cal is NOT an easy place to do premed. The med school acceptance percentages bear this out. Particularly considering the high stats of those accepted into Berkeley out of high school</p>
<p>The competition for grades in the science is intense at Cal. Not because people are mean or purposely trying to undermine each other, but simply because the classes like freshmen Chem are filled with very ambitious kids taught by professors who are very “old school” when it comes to grading. This is not bad in of itself, but the problem is the other schools do not operate like this. Stanford, Pomona, CMC etc… grade very differently and their students look much, much better on paper. Not only that, they tend to have excellent letters of rec. whereas the typical Cal student letters are pretty pathetic: “Little Billy was one of 900 hundred kids in my O-chem class, he got an A- and seems like a nice boy”. </p>
<p>Schools like CMC and Pomona often times have med school acceptance rates of 95-100%. You would think Cal would have numbers at least close to that, but they are not even in the same ballpark.</p>
<p>The sad thing is that I think a Cal education is excellent prep for med school. I was a slightly above average premed at Cal, but did very well in med school and did not find it particularly challenging. There were over a dozen Cal students in my med school class (USC btw) and most of us graduated in the top 10% of our class…ahead of most of the Stanford, Harvard, Yale and Dartmouth grads. Unfortunately, despite my best efforts, med school admissions folks are very hung up on GPA and “prestige names”. Even if these prestige colleges hand out A’s to anyone with a pulse.</p>
<p>You can get into med school from Cal, but it is going to be a lot harder compared to other schools. The good news is that if you do get accepted you will likely do very well there. </p>
<p>I loved my time at Cal. I just wish the word would get out as to how damn competitive the grading is there compared to many private schools.</p>
<p>after what you guys have said how competitive it is…is it possible to switch from my major MCB to business??</p>
<p>this sounds very intimidating,…should i just go to ucsd instead??
or trasnfer to ucla after one year??</p>
<p>^ </p>
<p>Choroidal said, "The sad thing is that I think a Cal education is excellent prep for med school. I was a slightly above average premed at Cal, but did very well in med school and did not find it particularly challenging. There were over a dozen Cal students in my med school class (USC btw) and most of us graduated in the top 10% of our class…ahead of most of the Stanford, Harvard, Yale and Dartmouth grads. "</p>
<p>I know many people who chose to go to Cal for pre-med. They all said it was tough while they were in Cal, but medical school was really easy compared to the work at Cal and that they were doing better than other med students around them. </p>
<p>I’m going to Cal for pre-med and I’m expecting it to be very challenging, but I feel that even if I don’t get into medical school (because of GPA or MCAT and whatever else), my Cal degree will still be prestigious enough to take me somewhere [hopefully].</p>
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<p>If you are already at the stage of having declared MCB, you may not have enough time to take the business prerequisites and apply to the business major, unless you already took most of the business prerequisites already.</p>
<p>If you are a high school senior who is going to Berkeley next year, be aware that if you put anything in the College of Letters and Science, you will enter undeclared. You then declare a major after about two years after having taken the prerequisite courses. Some majors require applying to declare the major (this includes business).</p>
<p>You can take the pre-med courses alongside any major; you do not have to do a biology major to do pre-med.</p>
<p>im an incoming freshmen,(asuming that i got accepted), so if i put MCB as my major on my UC app, it means i will go in as undeclared? if so,…i could major in business and take bio courses alongside…? do you think that is a good combination, because the two majors are completly on the the opposite sides</p>
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<p>Is it really that easy to get an A at some of those schools? This would have to be specific to premed courses. Am pretty sure Stanford engineering is hard.</p>
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<p>Yes, you will enter as L&S undeclared.</p>
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<p>Yes, although the business major has a lot of requirements, so scheduling could be a tight fit. It is probably doable, since it will probably involve about 6 additional courses that do not overlap with the business major or breadth requirements. (But all 6 would be lab courses, which tend to be more work than their credit units indicate.)</p>
<p>If you do go to medical school and become a physician, a business background may help if you go into a private or small group practice.</p>
<p>"Is it really that easy to get an A at some of those schools? This would have to be specific to premed courses. Am pretty sure Stanford engineering is hard. "</p>
<p>At many schools, engineering is the only thing that retains any grading integrity. The overall average GPA at Stanford is around 3.6, despite having a large engineering department. In many liberal arts majors, the AVERAGE graduate will have a 3.8 GPA, which might be top 5% at many public schools (around top 10% at Berkeley), putting him in a great position for law/medical schools, especially. </p>
<p>However, even engineering is not safe from inflation. I’m not sure about Stanford, but at Duke in 2008 in example, in the Engineering school, top 25% was 3.77, while in the L&S school, top 25% was 3.71. It’s gotten a bit better, now requiring 3.68 to be top 25% in either. Keep in mind Stanford is more inflated than Duke overall by .1 to .15.</p>
<p>Is it wrong for me to be angry about the grading system Cal has? </p>
<p>I mean I can understand it is Cal, but something just don’t sit right with me.</p>